This page summarizes the aims and procedures of the Copyright Information Project.
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The project's goal is to gather detailed information about the copyright laws of every country and/or territory as they apply to printed music, sound recordings and other similar media, and how they apply to IMSLP. Another goal of the project is to organize and group countries that have similar copyright laws, such as some of the signatory countries of the Berne convention. Please feel free to edit, organize, and suggest ideas for improving our available copyright information. The ultimate goal of this project is to organize information about copyright law in every country. Note that some pages can and will contain more than one country, due to the grouping described above.
The result will be Copyright By Territory, a page linking to each individual copyright page. The pages for the United States, Canada, and EU (general rules) will be listed at the top because they are the most important areas for IMSLP contributors and copyright reviewers. Each EU country will eventually have a separate page. The general page, however, will still be useful, and will retain its placement. The current public domain page will retain its importance as an "international" page, and will be maintained.
The first step is to create a framework for the link page. This organization will be accomplished with a sortable table, as drafted here.
This project is not a typical IMSLP community project; it is closer in spirit to the categorization project. This information, due to its legal content, must be maintained at a very high level of accuracy. Therefore, there will be a large degree of heierarchy in how the project is run. Pages for individual territories will have to approved by those appointed as having the requisite expertise to accurately assess the quality of the page. The project will still be a collaborative effort, however. The amount of effort involved to create these pages will prohibit the project from functioning with the "leaders" doing all of the work. Those interested are actively encouraged to contact designated reviewers about joining.
A secondary goal is collecting all copyright cases that are relevant to IMSLP. Ultimately they will be sortable by name and date, and each copyright case will have a complete description in a standardized format.
Designated Reviewers
Other Members
EU page underway. Other pages to commence soon.
The framework for the "Copyright by Territory" page is in progress: IMSLP:Copyright Information Project/MainDraft.
